If you’ve followed this blog for a while you’ll have noticed that crime and punishment are predominant themes and that my position on these issues can be summarised as either pragmatic and enlightened or pie-in-the-sky wishy-washy liberalism. I’m not a great believer in punishment.

There are many reasons for this, the most important being that as a form of correction punishment is largely ineffective. We all want less crime, but putting people in prison for longer and longer doesn’t lead to less crime. It may in fact do the opposite.

Another important reason is that I’m a hard determinist, that is to say I don’t believe in free will. I’ve held this position since I was 16, long before the ever-expanding list of physical and personality traits that we now recognise as genetically determined had even been conceived.

Hard determinists have trouble with punishment, since blame can only attach to those with genuine freedom of choice.

Among my predetermined personality traits is laziness. If I weren’t so lazy, I would blog more often. But for the next few weeks I have an additional excuse. I’m on holiday. So I’ve decided to re-publish some columns I wrote for various newspapers and magazines over the years which have at least some relevance to the topics discussed on this site over the past year.   And where better to start than this piece from the Listener on why you really don’t have a choice. 

I’m What They Call ‘A Hard Determinist’

I’m what they call “a hard determinist”. It is my firm and honest conviction that what we call ‘free will’  is an illusion, that the course of our lives is determined at every stage. 

Determinism is an unpalatable philosophy which few people accept, since it appears to turn human beings into automatons and to strip us of our dignity.

Most people, however, will accept some degree of determination in their lives. Quite clearly, we don’t have any choice in whether we come to exist or not, and that is the precondition to everything that follows. Teenagers recognise the strength of this argument when they tell their harassed parents that they ‘didn’t ask to be born’.

We have no choice in the matter of our sex or sexuality. Yet being male/female, straight/gay or somewhere along the spectrum in-between has an enormous influence on the course of our lives.

We have no choice in the matter of our skin-colour or race, factors which only the most naïve would deny as being significant determinants in a person’s life.

Our innate intelligence is set down before birth and there is very little evidence to support the idea that we can significantly improve it. So if you are a person of only average intelligence, you will never be a doctor, lawyer, dentist, airline pilot, university lecturer, architect, physicist etc. All those avenues and a thousand more are barred to you before you even start.

Our state of health and life expectancy – along with the so-called ‘lifestyle choices’ we make – whether to diet, exercise, smoke, take drugs, drink to excess, eat healthy food – are largely determined by our genetic make-up. Gene replacement will be at the heart of future medicine.

Beyond our control too is the way we look, whether we are tall or short, fat or thin, attractive or unattractive. These matters, again, have a significant effect on the course of our lives.

More and more we are discovering that what we are and how we behave are the result of genetic blueprinting, laid down at conception, and over which we have absolutely no control. As a result of  his studies of identical twins, separated at birth and reunited later in life, Minnesota Psychology Professor, Thomas J. Bouchard, concluded that our genes account for our entire physical make-up and 50 percent of our psychological make-up or personality.

So what of the other 50 percent? What of environment?

Well,  just as the individual cannot control his or her genetic inheritance, so none of us can control the environment into which we are born. You don’t get to choose between Remuera and the slums of Calcutta.

If you are born in a country where there is nothing to eat and die in infancy, you clearly have no control over your destiny. Tens of  millions of human beings come into this category.

One step up is being born into grinding poverty. This significantly limits your opportunities to live a happy, healthy life and may predispose you to criminal behaviour. The common factor in prison populations internationally may well not be race but poverty. The indigenous peoples of colonised nations are universally over-represented among the poor.

And then there is the critical issue of upbringing. As a general proposition, children from warm, nurturing homes become warm, nurturing people. Children from violent, abusive homes have a more than even chance of becoming violent, abusive people.

Studies of violent offenders in this country and elsewhere reveal the most extraordinary similarities in background – large families, poverty, unemployment, poor levels of educational achievement, poor communication skills, early experience of violence or sexual abuse.

To the hard determinist the nature versus nurture debate is largely irrelevant. What matters is that the combination of the two constitutes a total denial of the possibility of free choice in anything.

The most frequent response I get to all of this is that, if I really believed it, I might as well go sit in a corner, do nothing and wait to die.  It is, of course, a silly argument, since heredity and environment have combined to make me the sort of person who could never sit in a corner, do nothing and wait to die.

There is a paradox here of course. Though I believe I have no free will, I live as though I had. I’m that sort of person – stroppy, independent, free-thinking, wilful and responsible for my actions. I was made that way. It’s in the genes and the upbringing. I could not be otherwise.

Nonetheless, I have no doubt whatsoever that my belief is correct, that more and more scientific evidence is accumulating and will accumulate to support it, and that one day this minority position will be the view of the vast majority. 

And by the way, it’s the real reason why I agree with Nigel Latta on most of the reasons why some innocent little babes turn into violent offenders – right up to the point where he says they had a choice.